• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“If there was ever a product that catalyzed what’s Apple’s reason for being, it’s this,” Steve said of the iPod to Steven Levy, the reporter, “Because it combines Apple’s incredible technology base with Apple’s legendary ease of use with Apple’s awesome design … it’s like, this is what we do. So if anybody was ever wondering why is Apple on the earth, I would hold this up as a good example.” Steve’s response to Robin’s e-mail was less ostentatious and more analytical, almost as if presenting to a jury his closing arguments.

From: Steve Jobs

Date: Tue Oct 23, 2001 10:40 PM

To: Robin Miller

Subject: Re: Why does the iPod exist?

I respectfully would like to disagree with you, Robin. The iPod has many breakthroughs that have never been seen before in a portable digital music device.

Just to name a few advances:

- The iPod holds a 1000 songs and fits in your pocket

- The iPod weighs just 6.5 ozs

- The iPod has a state-of-the-art lithium polymer battery so that it plays continuously for 10 hours

- The iPod has Apple's legendary easy to use interface

- The iPod has a unique scroll wheel so you can operate it with one hand

- The iPod uses FireWire to load all your music on it at a blazing 5 to 10

seconds per CD

- The iPod also charges itself over FireWire, fast charging to 80% in just one hour

- The iPod automatically syncs with your iTunes library so it is easy to

get all your music and playlists on it

- The iPod is also a portable 5GB HD

I could go on and on. The iPod is the first truly usable portable digital music player and hopefully will, with all it's innovations, make this new product category a success. Other products may be priced anywhere from $50 to $500 but none have been worth their price because they just haven't worked yet (they are big, slow, have bad UIs, are hard to update, etc etc.).

There are many consumer products people pay about $400 for today (TVs, Stereos, Bikes, DVD players, Microwaves, Satellite dishes, game systems, cameras, camcorders, etc.). More importantly breakthrough category devices like CD Players, DVD players, cell phones, Walkmans, and more have appeared in this price range and been very large successes. What is important is that the product deliver on an important need while also providing a great value. I may be biased but I think iPod does both far better than any consume digital audio product yet.

Steve

A reply that long from Steve is rare, but he had broken from his usual one- to three-word responses for similarly combative challenges.When Leo Prieto wrote on June 29, 2004 to Apple executives accusing them of stealing the concept for Konfabulator, the desktop widgets platform that was later acquired by Yahoo, and adapting it for Apple’s own Dashboard feature, Steve wrote: “Excuse me, but Mac OS 9 had desktop Widgets long before Konfabulator did. Apple was the first to use the term Widgets as well. We never complained when the Konfabulator guys ‘ripped off Apple’ and I think its a bit unfair for them to be claiming we ripped them off now.”

Gauging which flames would set Steve off was a sport in itself. Sometimes he would pontificate on topics of very little importance to anyone except for a small corner of the programming world. Responding to an e-mail on Christmas day in 2005 from Nitesh Dhanjani claiming that the Objective C language, which Apple uses for the Mac and iPhone, “sucks,” Steve retorted: “Actually, Objective C is pretty great. Its far nicer than most other ways of writing apps. What don’t you like about it? What do you like better?” Nitesh wrote back saying he favored C#, Microsoft’s .NET and Ruby. Steve said: “I guess we disagree. First of all, .NET with CLI and managed code runs SLOW, so most serious developers can’t use it because of performance. Second, the libraries in C# are FAR less mature and elegant than those in Cocoa. We are working on a better implementation for garbage collection than we’ve seen out there so far, but in the